Improving 11th form students’ listening comprehension through modified listening tasks of the new te...

Improving 11th form students’ listening comprehension through modified listening tasks of the new textbook English 11 at Trieu Son No2 High School THANH HOA SERVICE OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING TRIEU SON[.]

THANH HOA SERVICE OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING

TRIEU SON No2 UPPER-SECONDARY SCHOOL

EXPERIENCE INITIATIVE

IMPROVING 11TH FORM STUDENTS’ LISTENING COMPREHENSION THROUGH MODIFIED LISTENING TASKS OF THE NEW TEXTBOOK ENGLISH 11 AT TRIEU

SON No2 UPPER-SECONDARY SCHOOL

Researcher: Lê Đình Thắng Post: The head of group

Field: English

THANH HÓA, NĂM 2018

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

1.1 Rationale……… 3

1.2 Aims of the study……… 3

1.3 Scope of the study……… 4

1.4 Methods of the study……… 4

2.1 Theoretical basis of the initiative 5 2.2 The real situation of teaching listening skills at Trieu Son No2

upper-secondary school

2.2.1 The syllabus of teaching and learning English

2.2.2 The teaching and learning English speaking skills

2.3 The used measures to solve the problems

2.3.1 Initial data

2.3.1.1 Results from pre-listening test

2.3.1.2 Results from pre-action stage observations

2.3.1.3 Results from students’ questionnaire 1

2.3.1.3.1 Students’ evaluation about listening skill and their own

listening competence

2.3.1.3.2 Students’ opinions about listening tasks in English 11

2.3.1.3.3 Students’ feelings when doing listening tasks in English 11

2.3.1.3.4 Students’ evaluation about the effectiveness of listening

tasks to their listening competence

2.3.1.3.5 Students’ preferences for listening tasks

2.3.1.3.6 Students’ opinions about the way their teachers treat

listening tasks

2.3.1.4 Results from document analysis

2.3.1.4.1 English 11

2.3.1.4.2 Listening tasks in listening sections of English 11

2.3.2 The hypothesis

2.3.3 Planning action steps

2.3.3.1 Replacing

2.3.3.2 Omitting

2.3.3.3 Changing

2.3.4 Data collected in the action stage

2.3.4.1 Results from action stage observations

2.3.4.2 Results from Questionnaire 2

2.3.4.3 Results from teaching diaries

2.3.4.4 Results from post-test

2.3.5 Action research evaluation

5 6 6 7 7 7 7 8 8 8

9 9 10

10 11 11 11 11 12 13 14 15 15 15 16 16 16 17 18 19

2.3.5.1 Students’ involvement in tasks before and after action plan.

2.3.5.2 Students’ progress reflected through tests

2.3.5.3 Students’ preferences for listening tasks

2.3.5.4 Modified listening tasks could help improve students’ listening comprehension

3 CONCLUSIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS

3.1 Conclusions

3.2 Recommendations

19 19 20 20

22 22 22

REFERENCES………

APPENDICES

1 INTRODUCTION 1.1 Rationale for the study

The years 2006, 2007 and 2008 marked a milestone in the ways of teaching and learning English when the Ministry of Education and Training (MOET) introduced the new sets of English textbook English 10, English 11 and English 12

to school curriculum The aim of MOET is to develop students’ communicative competence so as to meet the demand of integration and globalization That is the reason why in the new textbooks, four skills including reading, speaking, listening and writing are put in priority and integrated

Of the four skills mentioned above, listening is considered to be the most challenging one Most students find it hard to master this skill and soon feel bored with listening periods The reasons for this are various, such as uninteresting topics, fast speed, students' poor pronunciation or lack of background knowledge and cultural understanding

Eleven graders at Trieu Sơn No2 High School have encountered such a lot of difficulties when dealing with listening lessons However, after five years of teaching English 11, I also discover that the listening tasks themselves are also a factor affecting students’ listening comprehension

It is obvious that suitable tasks make students more interested in the listening passages and then help them develop their listening skills Inappropriate tasks, on the contrary, can demotivate students In listening sections of English11, some tasks are too difficult or too long and some are boring In this case, it is necessary for teachers to modify listening tasks to make the tasks more suitable and interesting for learners, even though it is not an easy job for the teacher as modifying tasks means having to take many things into accounts such as the objectives, the criteria or the student’s needs However, for the benefit of students,

it is worth doing so

For the above reasons, especially for the researcher’s desire to help her students

better at listening, the choice of the study entitled “Improving 11 th form students’ listening comprehension through modified listening tasks of the new textbook English 11 at Trieu Son No2 High School ” is not accidental.

1.2 Aims of the study

The main purpose of this research is to study the effects of modified listening tasks of English 11 on improving 11th form students’ listening comprehension at Trieu Son No2 Upper-Secondary School The specific objectives

of the study are:

 To investigate students’ attitudes towards listening tasks in English 11 and the difficulties they face

 To study whether the modified listening tasks could help students improve their listening comprehension

1.3 Scope of the study

Due to the limited knowledge, energy and time, the researcher was unable

to carry out the investigation on a large scale This action research was only conducted for only 8 weeks with the four listening lessons and in the context of 40 eleventh-grade students at Trieu Son No2 High School in the academic year

2017-2018 only Hence, the results of the study is only limited to the above teaching context and participants

1 4 Methods of the study

The author has applied the following methods in this study:

Data collection results from interviews (for teachers), survey questionnaires (for students) and class observations

Data analysis is done through coding, classifying, and reporting the information

2 CONTENTS 2.1 Theoretical basis of the initiative

In our daily life, outside the classroom, listening is used twice as often as speaking, which in turn is used twice as much as reading and writing (River, 1981) Inside classroom, the two often used skills are listening and speaking (Brown, 1994) Therefore, listening plays an important role in the processes of learning and communication essential to productive participation in life

What is listening? Through years, various definitions of listening have been proposed Listening is more than merely hearing words It is considered to be an active process by which students receive, construct meaning from, and respond to spoken and or nonverbal messages (Emmert, 1994)

Brown (1994) argues that listening is a skill in which to identify and understand what is being said, listeners must comprehend “a speaker’s accent or pronunciation, his grammar and his vocabulary”

Sharing similar ideas, Barker (1971) defines listening as “the selective process of attending to, hearing, understanding and remembering aural symbols”

Listening comprehension is very important in the process of learning a language According to Rost (1994: 141), listening comprehension is “vital in the language classroom because it provides input for the learner Without understanding input at the right level, any learner simply can’t begin” He also argues that “Spoken language including listening provides a mean of interaction for the learners Because learners must interact to achieve understanding access to speaker of the language is essential Moreover, learner’s failure to understand the language they hear is an impetus, not an obstacle, to interaction and learning” Obviously, listening comprehension is an essential skill for almost interaction It is therefore the most primary medium for input in language learning process and by speeding up the students' ability to perceive speech, the amount of input they get will increase and thus aid students' language acquisition

To conclude, given the importance of listening in language learning and teaching, it is essential for language teachers to help students become effective listeners

2.2 The real situation of teaching listening skills at Trieu Son No2 upper-secondary school.

2.2.1 The syllabus of teaching and learning English.

At Trieu Son High School No2, English is one of the compulsory subjects in the curriculum The syllabus and the textbooks for English including “Tiếng Anh 10”, “Tiếng Anh 11”, “Tiếng Anh 12” are prescribed by the Ministry of Education and Training

The English curriculum for grade 11th students is divided into two semesters with a total of 105 periods, 3 periods per week Each period is 45 minutes long

The textbook which is currently used for teaching and learning English for grade 11th at Triệu Sơn High School No2 is “Tieng Anh 11” which was designed following communicative approach The textbook consists of 16 units with 5 parts

in each unit arranging as follows: reading, speaking, listening, writing and language focus in which a variety of exercises and tasks was compiled for practice Also, there exists a consolidate unit after every 3 units The objective of these units

is to examine how well the students have achieved in the previous units

2.2.2 The teaching and learning English speaking skills

It has been accepted that students’ communicative ability is the proper aim for language teaching This makes teaching and learning speaking skills seem to be

an important part in any English course Like many other high schools in Vietnam, teaching and learning listening skills at Triệu Sơn High School are affected by some constraints such as large class sizes, students’ unfamiliarity with CLT, students’ low English proficiency, students’ low participation in class time Normally, in a class at Triệu Sơn High School, a number of students who have a good knowledge of English are eager and active during the class while a majority

of those with low English proficiency are very passive Besides, lack of training in teaching methods, especially CLT makes it difficult for the teachers to access to new approach, which makes the teaching and learning listening skills more challenging

2.3 The used measures to solve the problems.

2.3.1 Initial data

2.3.1.1 Results from pre-listening test

Students would do a test to measure their level

Below are the results of the test

Table 1: Results of the pre-test

Numbers of

students

From the table, it can be seen that 74% of the students scored below average, whereas students achieving average scores made up 20% and only 6% could get from mark 7 to mark 10 The result of the test showed that most of the students were quite weak at listening skill Students need to be helped to improve this skill

2.3.1.2 Results from pre-action stage observations.

At pre-action stage, the researcher taught Unit 1 (Friendship) and Unit 2 (Personal experiences) with non-modified tasks The lessons were observed by another teacher During the observations, this teacher took notes and gave the total marks of students’ involvement in the tasks in the two periods The following is the description of one lesson:

 Class: 11C4

 Number of students in class: 40

 Time: 45 minutes

 Unit 1: Friendship

 Period 5: C - LISTENING

As usual, the lesson started with warm-up The teacher asked her students

some questions (Who is your best friend?, How long have you known each other?,

What qualities do you admire in your best friend?) Then, students worked in pairs

to ask about their best friends in 4 minutes After calling one pair to ask and

answer in front of the class, the teacher introduced the lesson (Today we will listen

to two monologues of Lan and Long They are talking about their best friends)

Before students listened to the passages to complete the tasks, teacher introduced some words and phrases Then students continued the lesson with task 1 deciding True/False statements They were asked to work individually, run through the 11 sentences in task 1 and underline the key words Then teacher played the tape twice

After that, the teacher asked students to give answers However, few of them had all the answers Some even paid no attention to the task The teacher stopped

by each sentence for checking

Students, then, came to task 2 in which they had to take notes of what Lan and Long like about their friends and how and where they met The teacher again played the tape twice However, this task seemed to be difficult for students as almost no student noted down anything The teacher had to provide help The lesson flew slowly

Finally, the teacher gave some cues and asked students to work in pairs to talk about Lan’s and Long’s best friends

Here are the results from the observations First, it should be mentioned that the observation sheet had six items, but during unit 1 and 2 the observer only used four items to observe students’ involvement in the tasks The highest mark for each item was 5 and the highest mark for the whole class in each lesson was 20 The highest total mark for the observations during two lessons was 40

Below are the concrete results:

Table 2: Students’ involvement in the tasks

(Friendship)

Unit 2 (Personal experiences) Marks of students’ involvement in

the tasks

It can be seen from the table that level of students’ involvement in the tasks

was quite low In Unit 1 (Friendship), the percent of students who involved in the tasks accounted for 40%, while in Unit 2 (Personal experiences) was a bit higher

with 45% This figures showed that more than half of the students paid no attention

to studying listening They barely participated in the lessons This may be resulted from two main reasons: the first one, maybe, is that the tasks themselves are uninteresting; the second one is probably due to students’ low level of listening competence

2.3.1.3 Results from students’ questionnaire 1.

2.3.1.3.1 Students’ evaluation about listening skill and their own listening competence.

(Questions 1 and 2)

When answering the first question about their evaluation about learning listening skill, most of the students (96 %) admit that learning listening skill is difficult, even extremely difficult

Regarding to students’ self-evaluation about their own listening comprehension ability, only 1 out of 50 students confidently said that her listening ability was very good; whereas 78% thought that they were very bad at listening

In listening lessons, they almost hear nothing

2.3.1.3.2 Students’ opinions about listening tasks in English 11 (Questions 3, 4

and 5)

When answering the question how often they completed listening tasks in listening lessons, 2% of the students said that they always completed listening tasks, 14% often finished, but 84% sometimes could finish the tasks The result also showed that 66% of the students confirmed that kinds of listening task in the textbook were not very diversified

Question No 4 tried to seek the frequency of listening tasks in listening

lessons The results are clearly presented in the table below:

Table 3: Frequency of listening tasks in listening lessons

Answering

open-ended

questions

(%)

Filling missing words (%)

Decidin

g T/F stateme nts (%)

Numberin

g the pictures (%)

Multiple choice question s (%)

Completin

g missing informatio

n in the table/

charts (%)

Ticking the things you hear (%)

As can be seen that the most frequently used tasks in listening lessons are answering open-ended questions Filling missing words and deciding T/F statements rank second with 24% for each kind Such kinds of task as numbering the pictures, multiple choice questions and ticking the things you hear are

sometimes present Only the tasks of completing the missing information in the table/charts are rarely used The information in this table once again confirmed that listening tasks in English 11 are not very plentiful

2.3.1.3.3 Students’ feelings when doing listening tasks in English 11

Question No 6 examines students’ feelings when doing listening tasks in English 11 The results can be seen in the following table:

Table 4: Students’ feelings when doing listening tasks in English 11

Very interested

(%)

Interested (%)

(%)

When asked to express their feeling when doing listening tasks in English

11, the majority of the students (accounting for 54%) said they felt very bored with the listening tasks in the textbook 38% of them felt normal and only a small number of students were interested in the tasks

It is obvious that listening tasks in the textbook dissatisfy most of the students, which can not motivate students to participate in the lessons as well as not to encourage them to develop their listening skill

2.3.1.3.4 Students’ evaluation about the effectiveness of listening tasks to their listening competence.

Table 5: Students’ evaluation about the effectiveness of listening tasks

Very effective

(%)

Table 5 presents that only 6% and 8 % of the students thought that listening

tasks in the textbook were very effective and effective, while 34% of them spoke

that they were not clear whether the tasks could help them improve their listening comprehension Especially, 52% believed that their ability for listening comprehension was not improved They claimed that the tasks were totally ineffective

2.3.1.3.5 Students’ preferences for listening tasks.

Question 8 was used to collect information about the listening tasks that students preferred The results are shown in the table below:

Table 6: Students’ preferences for listening tasks

Answerin

g

open-ended

questions

(%)

Filling missin

g words (%)

Deciding T/F statement s (%)

Numberin

g the pictures (%)

Multiple choice question s (%)

Completin

g missing informatio

n in the table/

Tickin

g the things you hear